Abstract

In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient key establishment scheme designed with respect to the unique requirements of Wireless Mesh Networks. Our security model is based on Identity-based key establishment scheme without
the utilization of a trusted authority for private key operations. Rather, this task is performed by a collaboration of users; a threshold number of users come together in a coalition so that they generate the private key. We performed
simulative performance evaluation in order to show the effect of both the network size and the threshold value. Results show a tradeoff between resiliency and efficiency: increasing the threshold value or the number of mesh nodes also
increases the resiliency but negatively effects the efficiency. For threshold values smaller than 8 and for number of mesh nodes in between 40 and 100, at least 90% of the mesh nodes can compute their private keys within at most 70 seconds. On the other hand, at threshold value 8, an increase in the number of mesh nodes from 40 to 100 results in 25% increase in the rate of successful private key generations.